Withnail & I (1987)

In 1987, Bruce Robinson released a film about two unemployed actors, a squalid Camden flat, and a weekend in the Lake District that goes badly. Nearly four decades of cult devotion have not persuaded Withnail and I to acquire a social conscience. It observes. It does not instruct. The camera lingers on dirty dishes, a chicken carcass, and the specific misery of drinking lighter fluid, and it draws no lesson from any of it. The film has nothing to say about the climate, the body, or race, and seems entirely untroubled by the omission.

The treatment of homosexuality is the film's most complicated asset. Uncle Monty, played by Richard Griffiths as a velvet-voiced aesthete with deplorable intentions, pursues Marwood with a persistence the script plays for comedy. A modern audience would flag the predatory stereotype within seconds. Yet the material is drawn from Robinson's own experience of unwanted attention from an older director, which lends it a sour honesty a tidier film would sand away. The cast is white, British, and almost entirely male. Women appear as a waitress and little else. Presuming Ed, the lone Black character, exists to share a joint and depart.

There is poverty here, and unemployment, and a wealthy uncle whose Chelsea house is nicer than the flat, but the film never organizes these into an argument. It is too busy being funny, and then, quietly, sad. The closing scene, in which Withnail recites Hamlet to the wolves in the rain, is not a plea for anything. It is a portrait of a man being left behind. Some films arrive with a thesis. This one arrives with a hangover and a bottle of wine it did not pay for.

Thematic tags: true_story (loosely autobiographical).

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